Tuesday, March 24, 2009

One Thing Leads to Another

In January, I received an e-mail from a colleague in Puerto Rico asking if I would help her edit an article that she had written for a journal that is published in English. Through no fault of her own, this was kind of a rush request and I happily agreed to help her. Traditionally, people get paid to do this, but I am sure that someday I will need someone to edit something that I have written in Spanish, so I suggested that we just exchange editing instead of money. My colleague, Maria, insisted upon at least sending me some coffee from Puerto Rico to thank me and I accepted gladly. Imagine my surprise when my "PuertoRican care package," as she called it, arrived a few weeks ago and contained much more than coffee.

This picture shows the contents of the package: two kinds of candy, the a bag of "fancy" coffee (the brown one), "regular" coffee (the yellow and black package), papaya marmalade, and the tiniest, cutest coffee maker I have ever seen. I love this coffee so much that I am only allowing myself to drink it on the weekends and I make it in my really tiny new espresso maker. We used the papaya marmalade to glaze a ham that we made for Sunday dinner while Mother and Father of Ken were visiting and it was very good.

Thanks, Maria! This just goes to show you what happens when you do people a favor. I told Maria in my thank you note that I think I got the better end of the deal.